WBAIâs Radio Building Bridges: Your Community & Labor Report
Monday, February 6, 2012, 7- 9 pm EST, over 99.5 FM
Produced & Hosted by Mimi Rosenberg and Ken Nash
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The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness
with
Michelle Alexander, human rights activist, litigator, best-selling author
Racism is rampant. The Mayorâs, the NYPDâs policing policies and practices,
that resulted in the killing of an unarmed Rahmarley Graham, 18 years old in
his own home, and the vicious beating of Jatiek Reed and arrest on false
charges, last week are the latest, terrifying expressions of institutionalized
discrimination. The frightening and unwarranted explosion in incarceration
and the permanent consequences, their exclusion from society and permanent
stigmatization are indeed a new âJim Crowâ. And, daily, to the tune of more
than 7000,000 stop and frisks within the last 12 months African-American and
Latino residents of this city have been subjected to profiling, harassment and
criminalization through the NYPDâs Stop and Frisk practices.
Recently, Michelle Alexander spoke to an overflow, cheering audience at
Harlem's historic Abyssinian Baptist Church to announce the launch of the
new paperback edition of "The New Jim Crow" which is now # 5 on the
"N.Y. Times Bestseller List". She offered a bold and innovative argument
that mass incarceration amounts to a devastating system of deliberate,
racial control. In her incisive critique, former litigator-turned-legal-scholar Michelle Alexander argues that we have not ended racial caste in America, we have simply redesigned it. Alexander shows that, by targeting black men and decimating communities of color, the U.S. criminal justice system functions as a contemporary system of racial control, even as it formally adheres to the principle of color blindness. Just as it took a mass movement to destroy the Jim Crow system, Alexander argues that it will take a new mass movement to destroy the new caste system which she has labeled "The New Jim Crow". And this new movement is growing and being nurtured by Michelle Alexander and her analysis of "The New Jim Crow" is helping to build this movement.
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